The best snacks are short, often sweet, and always satisfying. The same goes for snackable content. Bitesize chunks that fulfill your potential visitors, straight from the feed.

Mark W Schaefer, author of The Content Code, defines snackable content as “easy on the eyes without a lot of processing”. It encompasses short videos, GIFs, memes and rich images or graphics.

As a destination, it’s a way for you to engage with followers in the feed without asking much of them in return. It’s a little nugget of inspiration or entertainment that appears in their feed, requiring little attention or engagement but providing a dose of delight that will stick with them.

‘Snacking’ is a key part of social media culture as consumers scroll, swipe and tab on mobile devices all day long. Our attention spans may be decreased to the point that we can’t fit in all of the long-form content we want to, but we like to be fed little but often thanks to social media.

The five key principles of snackable content:

It must be short and effective.
If it’s meant to be funny, informative or hard-hitting, it must achieve that goal in less than a few minutes.

It must allow users to stay in their natural habitat.
Snackable content is best enjoyed in the feed - whether it’s a video, image or text.

It must be eye-catching
Your intention is to grab the attention of people as they scroll through their feed.

It must be simple
If it needs explaining, or some wider context, or requires clicking a link - that’s not snackable content.

It must be fulfilling
A great concept and a clear understanding of your audience should stop ‘short’ meaning ‘lacking’

So what could good snackable content look like for a destination?

Keep your destination’s unique voice and perspective in mind, and think about how that can add value in small chunks to potential visitors on their social media scrolls.

Jealousy-inducing photos and GIFs that tell a story

Short, emotive videos of different experiences

Trailers and round-ups of events and promotions

Schedules, timetables, offers and promotions in graphic form

Great snackable content makes your follower stop, smile and then continue scrolling. It’s a great way to have consistent, enjoyable interactions with your audience that satisfy a specific need in their online content consumption. That might not lead to an instant sell, but it’s a great investment for relationship building and the positive sentiment you accrue each time a potential visitor finds you on their feed.

And it’s also great from a technical perspective. It’s cheaper and easier to produce than long-form content, so you can create more of it. At the same time, the more content your followers are positively engaging with in their Newsfeeds, the more chance you’ll have of being looked on favourably by Facebook’s algorithm when the time comes to post your big campaign ask.

Mark Zuckerberg recently stated Facebook’s ambitions to become Internet users’ first-choice destination for premium short-form content. Getting started on your snackable treats now will make the full meal go down a lot easier later.

In this workshop, we will be looking at the key differences between Snapchat, Instagram Stories and Facebook Live, and help you think about how each channel can help tell your story in a different way and what's best for your brand. This will be an interactive workshop so participants will have a quick deep dive look at the key differences in terms of approaches and audiences but then start planning out their own real-time story planning.

Discussion

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Who we are?

The Digital Tourism Think Tank is the name given to this initiative, which aims at providing thought leadership to the tourism industry in digital marketing best practice. This project was created by Nick Hall, Managing Director at
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